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I've played a bit of Dragon Age: Origins. This is my third time, I think. I like the game, but I don't think it's on the level of earlier games, certainly not even close to Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment as some people would claim. That's not to say Dragon Age sucks, it just feels too formulaic, even for Bioware*. At least with the proper mods and high difficulty even the almost endless filler combat becomes bearable, which is my biggest gripe.

*Dragon Age 2 is a much better game in terms of freshness of story telling, we all know the problems with it being rushed. It's not so bad when you stop thinking about it as Dragon Age 2 and pretend it's a spin off. Mind you, the problems with it are obvious and can't be justified but I liked how they tried to move away from the Bioware formula. I'm hoping Inquisition will be better.

Running With Rifles is pretty great, really. It's like a top down Arma but without all the complexity, but with the difficulty. The AI is very smart, with a few exceptions, sometimes I think I might be playing with humans (until I see how competent humans play) until they do something like empty a magazine at the floor trying to hit an enemy on the other side of a hill... But that's pretty much what I used to do.

Tonight I unlocked the sniper rifle so I gave it a try, I had been hoping it would let you see more of the battlefield but it doesn't, unless it's just a tiny bit more, I'm not sure. It does give you a super accurate shot, as you'd expect, but it's not always a one-hit kill. It seems to make the AI panic a bit too so it's a good suppressive weapon, like the machine guns, but unlike the machine guns you can fire it without being prone and you quite often hit what you're shooting at... But, next to guys with assault rifles and submachine guns, I feel a bit useless.

Running with Rifles is currently the best shooter out there. Nothing else is at the same level of brilliance as far as i'm concerned.

Finished Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons earlier. Spoilers: I knew something was wrong with that girl. When she crawled over the log instead of walking, I just had a bad feeling.
Great game overall, very atmospheric and pretty.

Very interesting. Also, that fits with much of what I have read about the game now I think back on it. Most of the best stories in this game do seem to revolve around defeat. Utter, complete, glorious defeat.

It's not exactly the most accessible game in the world, but its brilliance is that you don't really need to win or even be a good player for you to enjoy it. The in-game tutorials are pretty boring and mechanical, better check out an LP like this if you decide to give it a try:

Having picked up a small netbook which I convinced myself was for going back to Uni, I am playing The Banner Saga on that, a game I picked up on release but never made it more than an hour in for some reason.

On my desktop I'm bouncing between League of Legends, AssCreed IV, Tower of guns and TitanFall. Occasional Spurts of Dark Souls when I feel I can deal with it but I can't seem to get into it.

I'm playing Pokemon Liquid Crystal, a ROM hack based on Fire Red, and a spectacular scripting bug caused me to end up in the black void that envelops the outside of buildings you entered. I made the stupid decision to save the game right there so I could avoid losing an hour of progress in the hope that I could get out of there somehow, not fully realising that not being able to do so would mean losing all 25 hours I'd put into the game until then. But after some save game juggling to and from my Android emulator and my PC emulator, a lot of frustration with ghostlike save games that the emulators seem to produce, and some noclip cheats I'm back in the game. Hooray! I feel so accomplished.

Also playing Teleglitch now and then, and with the routine I'm developing I get the urge to write a guide on how to play it, just to organize my thoughts a bit. Which is probably a bit premature given I haven't managed to beat level 8 yet, but I can get to level 5 consistently, so I think I'm doing decently.

I bet the Twitch Plays Pokémon stream has sky-rocketed emulator and rom usage of Pokémon games and they were already pretty darn popular (but obviously Pokémon can't work on a non-mobile platform with reduced social elements...). I know I played a lot of X on my 3DS whilst watching the stream.

Anyhow...

In today's JG's Adventures, the story arc of "Without my GPU" continues with a glimpse into the madness of having his game collection be reduced to a handful of games that are playable. And playable is a loose interpretation in some cases!

You'd think I'd try and use this time to accomplish something else, but if anything it's just driven me to find what does work. So what does? Well, what I've tried thus far includes FTL (despite my issues with the game, it remains eminently playable), 2D Sonics, including Sonic CD, and Torchlight 2. I also imagine Binding of Isaac and VVVVVV will work, considering both work on my more broken laptop, but having 'completed' Isaac not so long ago and having no desperate appeal to go back and do some of the challenge stuff in VVVVVV, I've used to start them up.

So, FTL. I have gotten to the point now where easy is just straight up too easy, appear from when the game decides you're going to lose and you can only sit back and watch the fires burn. Normal still feels scummy though and I go back to my issue of not feeling like my application of skill is worth as much as I feel it should be. I entirely accept it's at odds with how the game is designed to be and at around 38 hours, that's not exactly bad for something I take issue with, but it is so quick and easy to play, the music is great (even if I will confess to turning that off and listening to some highly interesting Nerdist podcasts) and it's very easy to pause to leave and come back to. I...don't know how much more active I feel I can be in the game though than I already am; I can micro-manage fine, control things well, even in chaos, but I don't feel like it's enough.

Then there's Sonic which is, well, Sonic. I love it, and quite honestly I was surprised that CD worked because of the engine it works on, but I have also fully completed that. Then again, I thought I'd completely finished Sonic 2 and earlier this year I found out about a route I was never aware of before, some 22 years after its release! That leads me onto Torchlight 2. I've sung its praises plenty of times before and apparently I must do so again. Enabling Netbook mode, which I feel is a universal laugh at my expense although incidentally unlike TL1, it's an option you need to manually change in an .ini, as opposed to in the options menu, turning everything else off or completely down and a run resolution of 720 (native for me is, of course, 1080) and it, well...well it looks like this:

(Character name, Tara (it was going to be Tear, but I didn't think that worked well as a name) and my pet is a panther called Glitch (which I do think works well as a name)

Comparison shot to everything at full, 1080:

Never the mind! Despite how...questionable it looks, it does actually run at a constant 60fps (from best I can tell) so it maintains its smooth feel and great play. I have also decided to start a Hardcore run, which in itself triggers an achievement, of a Veteran difficulty Engineer. Yeah, yeah, I know it's cheesy, but 1) I haven't done a Hardcore run in TL2 before, or any of these types of games really apart from Path of Exile recently, and that was in a group and 2) I haven't had a run with the Engineer yet. My RPG build is Gun and Broad, but looking over the talents there's some really fun synergies you can clearly pull off. Most of them I won't be able to do, of course, but like the Embermage which I've played extensively with, there's a lot of options which is great.

The main problem of course is that single handed guns almost entirely go off needing Dexterity, a stat I don't see myself going into too much. This means my weapons are probably always going to be a little under-levelled for the environment, but I suppose that's where the abilities come in. I shall be playing the role of a tinker, so lots of bots and fire and electric damage where possible. Hey, just because it's Hardcore doesn't mean I can't do it my own way, right? Only had one close encounter, the first boss you come across in a side quest almost took me down, but one potion and I was as nicely topped up for victory. It's fun! Knowing you can die certainly adds an element of fun and excitement to it and to play a little conservatively, which is something I usually have a bit of trouble with.

I'll leave you with a bonus pic of poor/broken graphics. (I'll post my full set in the Screenshot thread.)

Just finished Lone Survivor. The atmosphere was fantastic, but I wasn't a huge fan of the gameplay, and found it unnecessarily frustrating at times. Aside from that, I found the ending to be something of a cop out, though that's down to personal preference more than anything. Overall, though, I'd say that it was good.

first ranked match in DotA 2 and they're already kicking my ass. The thing is, my team that time were grossly incompetent that I felt like I'm still playing in the normal pubs. Started like shit like most of my time as Meepo early stage but nothing for me to worry about. Got my farm despite four deaths before I was on the roll but by the time the game reached an hour, Lycan was too much to handle even if I have a sheepstick on tow. Lucky for us, we managed to plow through most of their defences and before Lycan does anymore damage, we zeroed in the ancient and won us the game. Welp, I now know who's another hard counter for Meepo now!

I've racked up an obscene amount of time on Kerbal Space Program in a short spa-- er, period of time and without even noticing. Last night I landed on Minmus for the second time with enough gear to do goo, material, temperature and seismic tests in three biomes, I collected something like 28 reports... Then ran out of fuel. Even though a fart could escape Minmus I only had 10 units of liquid fuel and 6 of RCS fuel, I tried to escape anyway or at least orbit it but that just resulted in a parabolic trajectory with absolutely no way of slowing down to land. Naturally I had Jeb EVA, collect the reports then jump off the stricken vessel to float back down with the jetpack to await rescue. This'll be a nice challenge, I think, but the addition of a probe capsule to the ship has affected (as you'd expect) the handling and fuel consumption.

10,000,000. It's surprisingly dull and random for a match-3 game. All you ever do is roll dices until you get a good run and then you buy slightly more loaded dice but there seems to be very little skill involved. Not exactly the high point of gameplay.

Just finished Lone Survivor. The atmosphere was fantastic, but I wasn't a huge fan of the gameplay, and found it unnecessarily frustrating at times. Aside from that, I found the ending to be something of a cop out, though that's down to personal preference more than anything. Overall, though, I'd say that it was good.

I thought the ending was an integral part of the themes of the game, from which the atmosphere followed.

On my part, I've been having trouble sticking with a game for quite some time. I've got at least a couple adventure games which I still haven't finished; I played once, for a couple hours, Darksiders which gave me this strange feeling of a hollow shell of a game; not to mention other stuff I've begun (sometimes more than once) and left in various states of completion. Last in line, Bardbarian which I'm very close to finishing only owing to its being neither complicated nor long.

Then, as much as my eureka moments with The Swapper impressed me, I'm feeling too tired to play anything that requires brainpower.

So I had this bit of a hankering for some survival and wandered for about 5 minutes in my last Minecraft world before heading to Don't Starve, this time on the pad, and I was doing pretty well, or so I thought, that is until the second full moon when I was going to put down my backpack and don my log armor and instead dumped it into the fire, promptly falling victim to a horrible death. Sigh.

Next stop was Krater. The beginning is a bit weak, especially the writing feels a little lackadaisical, there are a few bugs that at this point in time are hard to swallow (crash at start with default team, keyboard remapping not working 100%), and some choices don't really work out e.g. the half-baked voice acting, why not opt for some gibberish or sound effect like Don't Starve, or going 3D in the conversation screens - yes I get you guys had character models and animations done already, but that doesn't mean they look that great up close - was it really less expensive/more effective than using static portraits? -- but by the time I put it down, I was getting in the groove and managing the squad and that was feeling pretty good actually.

Darksiders doesn't really start building up any momentum until the first dungeon which takes a bit of time to get to. Once you've completed it though, you're well into the thick of it. Its depth develops as it goes on, but it's not that 'deep' of a game. The combat is as complex as you want it to be, really. Not exactly rewarding, but certainly fun enough.

So I rescued Jeb, but it wasn't until I tried to get him to board the capsule that I realised... I'd accidentally brought someone along for the ride. Jeb made it back ok, though, with over 1,600 science stored in the capsule and his brain, so I call that a success. Even if I did have to deorbit from Kerbin using the RCS thrusters. It was a nailbiter.

Darksiders doesn't really start building up any momentum until the first dungeon which takes a bit of time to get to. Once you've completed it though, you're well into the thick of it. Its depth develops as it goes on, but it's not that 'deep' of a game. The combat is as complex as you want it to be, really. Not exactly rewarding, but certainly fun enough.

Until you get to a shit damage sponge boss that is tedious in the extreme and stop playing just as you were starting to quite enjoy yourself in spite of the dreary aesthetic.

10,000,000. It's surprisingly dull and random for a match-3 game. All you ever do is roll dices until you get a good run and then you buy slightly more loaded dice but there seems to be very little skill involved. Not exactly the high point of gameplay.

I've been playing a lot of Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes lately which is just the opposite. Surprisingly quite tactically deep for a match 3 game. Really good fun actually.

Until you get to a shit damage sponge boss that is tedious in the extreme and stop playing just as you were starting to quite enjoy yourself in spite of the dreary aesthetic.

The only boss that I would come close to describing as a bullet sponge (mostly because it does pretty much no damage to you) is the third one...and I only thought that initially because I was doing it wrong and ended up making the fight take way longer than it should've. There's also the recurring boss fight in the final dungeon, but that's less bullet spongey and more repetitive.

Think it was the first one, some stupid bat style thing with what seemed like a gazillion hit points (it's entirely possible that I hadn't spent enough time faffing around upgrading my skills or upgrading the wrong ones and took it on too early hence the seeming non dying of the damn thing, either that or I'm rubbish!). It just felt unfortunate to me that the game chose that moment to start taking its cues from Metroid instead of Zelda. Crossing from derivative but quite fun into derivative and boring just didn't inspire me to go much futher, but I might be willing to give it another shot sometime as I'm definitely inclining towards games that I can sit on the couch and play with a controller at the moment and once Saints Row 4 is done I'll be needing another one.

From what I recall of that fight, it's throw bomb, hit a few times, rinse and repeat until dead. It has been years since I've played it and I really don't recall it being a bullet sponge, but it might well be. I know a lot of people had trouble with that fight too, again something I didn't encounter. Might've played a factor?

Yeah been quite a while for me but I seem to remember the rinse and repeat cycle taking an interminably long time to the point where after failing when I was probably very close to killing the damn thing I just didn't have the will to try the one more time I probably needed (I'm definitely less patient these days!).